Hear from senior civil servant Susannah Storey about her experience working in the civil service.

On 17 November, Susannah Storey will be in conversation with the Oriel’s Provost, Lord Mendoza CBE. Susannah is the Permanent Secretary at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

Previously, Susannah was Director General for Digital Technologies and Telecoms at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and Director General for Digital and Media Policy at the then Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.

When poverty goes down, a natural question is whether the poorest are reducing poverty the fastest. In current terms, are the poorest groups catching up, or being left behind. But at present there is no agreed metric for measuring the normative concept of 'leaving no one behind.' Between 2005/6 and 2019/21, India reduced the global multidimensional poverty index strongly, with 415 million leaving poverty in that time period and with the fastest absolute MPI reduction occurring in the poorer states and social groups.

This session will explore the evolving dynamics of European defence cooperation and integration, emphasizing the critical role of EU institutions and the challenges posed by national interests. We will examine how recent initiatives like the European Defence Fund and the Defence Industrial Strategy aim to transform defence collaboration. Using case studies like a European Air Shield and a Cyber Defence Common Project, we will discuss the challenges posed by national interests.

“Security” is a word that we all use every day in a variety of contexts – so much so that it rarely occurs to us to reflect on what we think it means (or on what it ought to mean). The academic study of International Relations is something of an exception: scholars from a variety of schools of thought embrace unconventional, idiosyncratic, and sometimes downright weird definitions.